Hot stuff

Cormac Kinney has a gift for getting his foot in the door -- and taking up residence. On a recent visit to Florida the 27-year-old finagled an invitation to the U.S.S. Nimitz from a former college roommate, an officer on board the aircraft carrier. When the ship headed for a naval base in Virginia the next day, Kinney stayed belowdecks and hitched a ride as a stowaway.

Call it the Trojan Horse strategy. As founder and chief executive of NeoVision, a Manhattan-based software maker, Kinney has sneaked into firms that are nearly as hard to penetrate as armored vessels -- and won the day by using converts within. "You never go the official route," says Kinney, who sells software to 2,000 financial institutions in 24 countries. "First you create champions for your product within the organization."

Back in 1995 Kinney had little experience in product sales. He did have an M.B.A. from Carnegie Mellon, $1 million from software he'd designed for H.J. Heinz Co. and Northwestern Mutual Life, a promising idea and plenty of moxie.

He needed it to peddle a slick new computer program he claimed could help securities traders beat the market. His software takes scads of financial data on a trader's computer screen and turns it in real time into "heat maps," luminous mosaics of red and blue squares, each representing a security. A red square signals a downward movement in price, earnings, volume, volatility -- or any combination of them -- over the course of the trading day. A blue square indicates upward movement.

With a heat map, a buying or selling opportunity jumps out because the eye can spot color changes faster than it can compare digits. A throbbing red square in a sea of blue tells a bond trader, say, that a yield curve has a dimple in it that can be exploited. The system can be programmed to flash, beep or call out "Buy! Buy!" Kinney designed more than 200 heat maps, covering everything from foreign currencies to S&P 500 stocks.

But how to convince banks and brokerages?

After moving his eight-employee company from Pittsburgh to Wall Street in the summer of 1996, Kinney started cold-calling traders at Merrill Lynch and J.P. Morgan. Out of every 50 traders, one or two agreed to let him give a demonstration -- right on the trading floor. It worked: Merrill bought three systems. "If you get enough pull from the traders, you can short-circuit the whole testing and budget-approval process," boasts Kinney.

By the end of 1997 he had installed heat maps in 50 Wall Street brokerages, charging $200 per user per month. That year NeoVision, spending heavily to develop new software, lost $1 million on sales of $1 million.

Kinney wanted faster action -- and turned to Bloomberg Financial Markets, whose data go out to 115,000 desktops at 35,000 financial firms, in the hope of bundling his software with its service. No way, said Bloomberg's top brass, not about to push someone else's product.

So Kinney targeted sales reps. Getting an appointment with "the lowest guy on the totem pole," Kinney would then drop in unannounced on the head of programming -- or Michael Bloomberg. Free heat maps, he argued, could help sell more Bloombergs. Kinney was willing to sacrifice a few accounts to gain visibility for his software. Execs relented a bit; now Bloomberg subscribers can download five free heat maps and order hundreds more from Neo-Vision. That generated $1 million of NeoVision's $12 million revenues for the fiscal year ended Apr. 30.

Not the windfall Kinney had hoped for but enough leverage to cut a more lucrative deal with Bloomberg's competitor, Bridge Information Systems. Once again Kinney exploited the inside edge, enlisting Charles Dill -- a former Bridge chief executive and principal in Gateway Partners, which invested $3 million in NeoVision for 12% of the company -- to place key telephone calls. The result: Bridge pays a yearly $250,000 licensing fee to carry samples of his heat maps, while its sales force is out flogging the full product line for him, taking a 25% cut of revenues.

His next frontier: day traders. If Kinney can get himself into the inner sanctum of Charles Schwab, America's biggest discount brokerage, he may be able to turn its brokers into his latest missionaries.